Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, A zombie apocalypse simulator/roguelike. It does a good job of being hard as balls without being unfair. You'll create your character badly, run into a pack of zombies, and realize that this isn't Final Fight where you can just throw yourself into wave after wave of enemies. Then you'll either quit because you're not getting muh instant gratification, or you'll continue dying repeatedly, slowly grasping details like that the zombies have senses of sight, hearing, and smell, that you move slowly when winded, etc.

Eventually you'll get past the first few days, and then the game changes. Suddenly it's less about not getting killed while desperately scrounging for food and water, and more about thriving with things like a mobile base/deathmobile. The monsters evolve. You find places more exotic than a pawn shop, meet the NPCs, dig into the lore behind all this weird shit you keep encountering. The "challenge mode" game-starts become viable.

>>774Oh man, CataclysmDDA! They recently had a stable 0.E release and I'm already started playing. For shits and giggles I decided to go on a Churl run, yelling in ye olde english while somehow surviving against the undead.

>>784I appreciate it more as a musical genre than the games themselves. It seems to have a weird sort of cult influence that way.>>786There's definitely something satisfying about yelling specific things at the zombies. I tell them EAT MY ASS and they all come a-shambling.

Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare (the first game). It was always a good meme of a game and it still is. I always find myself on servers with constant players and almost never get bored doing whatever in this game. Plus, all the middle schoolers in chat telling commands and trying to be as nice as they can, it reminds me of my late high schools years. All the customizations are actually worth the grind as the game lets you run wild on how you want your character to look, and the emotes in the game make all characters your very own. I’ve been playing this game so much during quarantine and have been loving it.

I've been playing Trails from Zero.The cast is great, my favorite from any trails game so far. I think the game benefits from keeping the same four primary members in your party for most of the time. It really feels like you get to know them. One of my gripes with Cold Steel was with how large the cast was none of them really felt all that unique. After their story section you would just drop the characters you didn't like and never really learn much more about them. But yeah, the Cross Bell arc has been really solid so far.